Missed Connections

The characters in Catherine Lacey’s fiction are always running away from themselves. In her first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, we meet a woman named Elyria as she’s about to leave for New Zealand with few plans other than abandoning her husband in Manhattan. In Pew, a genderless, ageless, and nameless person quite literally appears one day out of the blue, having spent the night sleeping in a church in a small Southern town, mystifying its members.